A Look Back: RSS feed information

The learning never stops where the internet is concerned. A friend mentioned that he read an article that I had written two weeks ago titled “Before Photography” about a Camera Lucida. He saw it on the Internet and it was not through our Lansing Current, but through the RSS Feed format on his computer.

I was completely amazed because after doing some research on my own, I found my articles are on an RSS web feed format. I was able to print out a list with the name and date of all the articles I had written. I had no idea about this as I had never heard of RSS (Rich Site Summary) which is dubbed “Really Simple Syndication." I found that you can send or receive information anytime you want on any subject and to any country by just subscribing to or creating these lists. There is free software available to create these RSS lists. This is a shortcut to keep people up to date on anything they are interested in.

In computer language, the RSS feeds can be read using software called RSS reader, which can be web based, desktop based or mobile devise based. The user subscribes to a feed by clicking a feed icon in a web browser. The RSS reader checks the users subscribed feeds regularly for new downloads and any updates. The RSS allows the user to manually inspect all the web sites they are interested in.

The basic idea of restructuring information about web sites goes back to 1995 when Apple computer’s advanced technology group developed the Meta Content Framework. What was done originally was called RDF site summary. This was the first version of RSS. There have been many versions and changes the last few years.

It is good to know that there are so many ways to gather information and most computer users know there is a wealth of information out there for the asking.